A collective breath rose and fell, the kind you don’t realize you’re sharing until it leaves you lighter.
“Reset,” the captain said, and the order sounded almost like a prayer answered.
We reset. The winch cable tightened. The bus came two grudging inches toward stable.
A boy in the receiving line sneezed and laughed at his own sneeze. Ms. Patel made another check mark. The woman with the pizza box wrote ALL in letters that bled but didn’t disappear.
June turned to me then, eyes tracking the children under blankets, the drivers who had become carriers, the teenagers running socks, the firefighters bracing poles like oars against a river that didn’t agree with us but hadn’t swallowed us either. “You all right?” she asked.
I surprised myself with the truth. “I didn’t know we could do this.”
June followed my gaze to the chain—hands still linked, just farther from the lip now—and then to Luke, who was looking at Zoe and Liam under the blanket as if memorizing a picture he needed for a rainy day that would surely come.
